Struggling today

[Blessed]

Need encouragement . Heart feels real flighty and jittery today. Pounding real hard and can't stop thinking about it.

[jamiebrown]

I feel exactly the same today keep getting wired flutters and palps all day

[Dweeb]

Mines been the same today aswel :(

Just tryin to ignore it as best as i can!

[Blessed]

Had EKG last Wednesday and yet I'm still worried. I've got to trust the doctors. But when u feel like this everyday and dizzy for months on end it's very scary

[Dweeb]

I get the dizzy feeling alot i just try and drink water and keep my self hydrated :) ur ok uve had a ekg done and it was fine just keep rememberin that :)

[ldts3012]

Have you tried breathing exercises or meditation? That might help.

[RunnerChick]

If the EKG came back, your heart is fine. :) I do feel you, though. The last week or so my anxiety has been so bad that my heart's been pounding and my chest is tight and hurts. I know it's not a heart attack but it still sucks. I try to just keep really busy so I don't think about my bs thoughts but it's hard not to. Especially when things hit a lull at work and then my roommate wouldn't answer my facebook chat, so I got all paranoid that she was mad at me or that she doesn't want to talk to me anymore or something. Just try your best to relax, even though I know it's not easy.

[mistiblue]

I know it is said a lot, but try not to think about it. The more you think about it, the more it will bother you. I have had this same problem for 2 months now. Heart flutters everyday...all day. I am currently undergoing testing. I had an ECHO on Friday, but haven't gotten the results yet. I go Thursday to get a holter and then Friday a stress test. I am a little nervous about these tests, but I know that the results will help me either way. I just need to know what is going on.
I have realized that the more I focus on the heart flutters the worse they get. For the last 2 days, I have had a cold and haven't been focusing as much on the flutters, so they have not been as frequent. My downfall is caffeine. I know it makes them worse, but I keep drinking it.
I hope that you feel better by now. God bless.

[Blessed]

Thank you. Just really struggling but it's got to get better

[Perses]

Hi Blessed,


I found this in NY Magazine: http://nymag.com/health/bestdoctors/2008/47567/



The hypochondriac is a virtuoso of interpretive flourishes, one whose impulse to assign dark meaning to the flotsam and jetsam of bodily sensation is unstoppable. No back pain, stomach discomfort, or patch of dry skin is beneath suspicion, which always inclines toward extravagant causes. Among the most characteristic, and noxious, features of hypochondriacal thinking is its catastrophism. “Hypochondriacs go for diseases that are most dramatic and acute,” notes Brian Fallon, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’re drawn to insidious diseases—cancer, MS, heart disease, lupus—that can’t necessarily be identified with 100 percent accuracy by the medical profession, and that affect multiple systems, and have a large variety of symptoms that come and go. In that way, hypochondriacs can always find something to support their fears.” Theirs is a kind of perverse grandiosity, preying on the impossibility of proving a negative. Who can say for sure that one’s body is not being infiltrated by disease? The hypochondriac wades into a spiral of dread, as Barsky says, “because the headache that you think is due to a brain tumor feels a lot worse than the one you think is due to eye strain.” Hearing about a new threat—SARS, bird flu—can induce panic; glancing at a medical show on television can lead to disease fixation; learning of the illness of a friend or acquaintance can generate a debilitating empathy. (Hypochondriacs often practice elaborate rituals of avoidance—refusing, for instance, to visit sick family members—in an effort to control their fears.) Michael McKee, a Columbia University Medical Center psychologist who has specialized in the treatment of anxiety disorders, points out that there is no safe middle ground for hypochondriacs between perfect health and deadly disease. “The hypochondriac has a thought, and it bursts into flame,” he says.



Unwilling to surrender themselves to fate, unable to accept the imperfect authority of medicine, hypochondriacs, Fallon remarks, “suffer from the pathology of doubt and are plagued with uncertainty.” Most can bear their physical symptoms; what they find intolerable is being denied an explanation for what they are feeling. They latch onto a theory about what, for instance, is causing their chest pain—heart failure, anyone?—and then they scan themselves for further signs of the disease. “It’s a disorder of extreme internal vigilance,” says Fallon. “They think they’re facing something that will kill them.” When friends and physicians fail to support their fears, hypochondriacs turn away, feeling resentful and abandoned. They seek comfort, instead, in amateur medical sleuthing. Not long ago, they could be found primarily in the health sections of bookstores and public libraries, furtively poring through reference books. More recently they have taken to wandering the infinitudes of the Internet. “Going online can be a nightmare for the hypochondriac,” Fallon says. “They can spend hours and hours going from site to site. It doesn’t help them feel any better, it often makes them feel worse, and it can totally wreck their home and work life.”


Although its features had long been known, it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association took the first steps to recognizing “hypochondriasis” as a distinct disorder, including it in that year’s edition of the canonical Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and being careful to distinguish the transient hypochondria that most people experience from time to time—at least 30 percent of patients’ visits to doctors are believed to have no identifiable medical cause—from the hard-core version of the malady. The threshold is high. Not only must the clinical hypochondriac be in the throes of life-altering distress and impairment as a result of an unsupported preoccupation with disease, but the preoccupation has to last at least six months. It takes a lot of stamina to sustain the lonely belief that one is dying for that long. According to Barsky, though, the crucial difference between a casual worrier and a hypochondriac is that the hypochondriac’s imagination of disaster is impervious to rebuttal. “These people are not reassurable,” Barsky says. “For instance: If you notice a mole on your hand, and it seems to have changed, maybe you’ll worry that you have a melanoma. That’s normal. But when you go to get it checked, and your physician tells you it’s not serious, you say, ‘Thank God, that’s what I wanted to hear.’ The hypochondriac responds in the opposite way. Their symptom gets worse.” Indeed, many of the most incorrigible hypochondriacs don’t bother visiting physicians at all. Inconsolable, they keep to themselves, paralyzed by fear that a doctor can do nothing for them but confirm their nightmare.


As the workings of hypochondriacal thought have begun, in recent years, to receive serious attention, much of the research that has emerged takes the form of intriguing hints—suggestions that the brain of the hypochondriac, like that of the person with obsessive-compulsive disorder, becomes an enemy of the restful mind. Barsky and colleagues found that hypochondriacs report higher than average sensitivity to bodily sensations—heat, cold, hunger, noise—and admit to finding minor irritants like insect bites and splinters unusually upsetting. Just as some people have sharper vision than others, Barsky proposes, hypochondriacs may be prodigiously attuned to their bodies. Their problem is that they don’t know how to tune out the bodily “background noise” of daily aches and pains that others barely notice. For the hypochondriac, according to Barsky, “the background static becomes intolerable.”

The standard psychoanalytic account of hypochondria maintains that the behavior is an expression of repressed conflicts—unexamined grief, yearning for parental love, distress over real or imagined transgressions. Fallon has seen some patients whose hypochondria can, he believes, be explained in this way. But he has also begun to provide a far more comprehensive account of a range of influences on the development of hypochondria. These include the habit, formed in childhood, of using medical complaints as an effective tool of gaining attention from parents. “These patients don’t even realize that it’s a habit,” Fallon says. “It’s just the way they deal with stress.” Another subgroup of hypochondriacs are strongly akin to obsessive-compulsives, though they limit their fixations to illness. (People with OCD tend to dwell on transmitting a disease, not dying from one.) Yet others have a deeper affinity with depressives.

Brain scans, he says, suggest that hypochondria involves a heightening of metabolic activity in the same areas of the brain that are affected in obsessive-compulsive disorder. In OCD patients, this hyperactivity depletes the brain of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which helps to account for the success in treating OCD with serotonin-reuptake inhibitors like Prozac. Fallon was the first scientist to study the effects of such medications on hypochondriacs and has convincingly challenged the traditional notion, supported by cultural and medical prejudice, that hypochondria is untreatable and that its hapless sufferers ought, above all, to buck up. In the late eighties, during his residency at Columbia, Fallon was introduced to a 50-year-old stockbroker with an unwavering belief that he had a brain tumor. The patient had had four brain scans, each of which proved negative, and none of which appeased his fears. He had already received a great deal of psychotherapy and had taken medication for anxiety. Nothing seemed to help. Indeed, given the literature on hypochondria, Fallon himself held out little hope for the man, who was also irritable and unpleasant. As a desperation measure, Fallon’s supervisor, an OCD researcher, suggested administering fluoxetine—Prozac—which was new to the market. In short order, the patient’s worries subsided and his personality was transformed. “Suddenly, he was this gracious, grateful person.”


In 1993, Fallon drew on this success and designed a large-scale study to treat hypochondriacs with Prozac. Within twelve weeks of taking the medication, 70 percent of Fallon’s subjects were substantially relieved of their health-related fears. Given the effectiveness of Prozac for a wide variety of depressive, obsessional, and anxiety disorders, the results were, perhaps, not surprising. Fallon was startled, though, by some of his peripheral findings, which demonstrated the dazzling, and disturbed, powers of the hypochondriacal mind. To begin with, a large number of subjects given a placebo improved just as substantially as those who had been given Prozac. More peculiarly, though, one patient taking the placebo developed an extraordinarily convincing array of the side effects associated with Prozac. Yet another patient, believing she had been switched, midway through the trial, from Prozac to the placebo, underwent a classic case of withdrawal from the drug and suffered a relapse of her hypochondria. It turned out, though, that she had remained on Prozac the whole time.

[aharris2456]

Perses - Thanks for the article.

I'm feel strange to day too, feel like my heart is pumping hard and just jittery all over.

[Dahila]

It will get better Blessed:)

[Perses]

Yeah, I actually thought it was a extremely well-written, highly informative, article.

I don't have this form of anxiety, but it does seem from my brief experience on this site, that there should be a whole special section devoted to hypochondria as there is to agoraphobia.

The last paragraph of the article was particularly fascinating. One woman on a placebo developed all the side-effects associated with Prozac, while another woman, convinced that she had been given a placebo midway through, experienced all the symptoms of withdrawal. It is amazing what the mind can do to itself.

Finally, I thought this fascinating as well:

Barsky proposes, hypochondriacs may be prodigiously attuned to their bodies. Their problem is that they don’t know how to tune out the bodily “background noise” of daily aches and pains that others barely notice. For the hypochondriac, according to Barsky, “the background static becomes intolerable.”

Because I think this inability to tune out or ignore the daily everyday worries or concerns, is what happens to people with anxiety more generally.